Don't know where to start using design in your digital products? Here's a suggestion

Guilherme Sesterheim
Bootcamp
Published in
3 min readJun 9, 2021

Design is one of the base investments for digital products in many industries (DMI 2015; Gartner 2018; McKinsey 2019). It should be used to foundations like understanding your customers and putting him at the center of your plans, and also on the other edge to help you find differentiators. As a continuation of the article from Jan 2019, this article describes some achievements some clients had during 2019 after a simple first step: mapping the user journey.

$150k savings with IVR

$150.000,00 yearly savings after micro changes to the IVR (Interactive Voice Response) of a bank. The exciting part here is that a very short user journey mapping process achieved it. It all started with the standard order to reduce costs on the chain. A UX Researcher was designated to make an evaluation of the entire set of channels used to communicate with the client.

During the first week of work, he noticed some reports on the IVR records shown that around 25% of calls redirected to a support position were regular questions like “what is my balance?”, “what is my pre-approved credit limit for a new car?” and “where is the closest branch in my neighborhood”? This scenario is one of the shortest journeys we can draw for a user: he just wanted to know his balance! The main pain point for the phone channel was that he was taking more than 2 minutes to do so. But there was also an opportunity to optimize costs.

The UX Researcher knew those topics should be answered without needing a human anymore. He delayed his initial researches and told the story to leadership. After a week of work, he and a developer were able to address two critical questions from clients on the IVR. They pulled questions that would be redirected to a human to answer down to the automatized services.

Decreasing around 25% of the need for a human to attend a call at that time has been saving $150k/year.

15% more sales after remodeling one node in the supply chain

This one goes the other edge in the complexity of changes in the process after journey mapping. Client 2 produces heavy machinery for farmers. He found out that one of the pain points for them to upsell more was the bureaucracy of field representatives. The farmers wanted to buy from their upsell strategies. Those products were directly related to more productivity and more profit.

But the pain point was that the representatives were slow in crucial activities of the chain: purchase and delivery processes. The purchase and delivery used to depend on much manual work involving taking the machine to a different facility to receive the software upgrade.

As an output of the journey mapping, entirely new software is now working and replaced the many old ones. This new system allows the farmers to buy the upgrades way faster than before, just like in e-commerce.

The light start

As the examples above show, mapping the journey of your user is an exciting way to start using design thinking methodologies in your company. After mapping the journey, many other tools may come like: workshops, more research, data analysis, prototyping, drawing screens, etc.

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Bootcamp
Bootcamp

Published in Bootcamp

From idea to product, one lesson at a time. Bootcamp is a collection of resources and opinion pieces about UX, UI, and Product. To submit your story: https://tinyurl.com/bootspub1

Guilherme Sesterheim
Guilherme Sesterheim

Written by Guilherme Sesterheim

Sharing experiences on IT subjects. Working for AWS. DevOps, Kubernetes, Microservices, Terraform, Ansible, and Java

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